Video: Tribeca Traffic Island Is Setting for 9/11 Remembrance, Indian Style

On a Franklin Street traffic triangle, Parul Shah performs a prayer dance, backed by singers Ritesh and Rajnish Mishra, and Naren Budhakar on percussion. Shah dances in the North Indian style of Kathak, which combines elements of both Muslim and Hindu cultures. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

Of the many 9/11 tributes and commemorative ceremonies that took place on Monday, none looked or sounded like the brief performance on a traffic island in Tribeca. 

Beginning at 8:46 a.m., the time of the attack on the World Trade Center’s North Tower, the plaintive sounds of two Delhi-based singers rang out beside the steps to the Franklin Street subway station. Dancer Parul Shah joined the singers, brothers Ritesh and Rajnish Mishra, and percussionist Naren Budhakar, to offer a solemn backdrop of classical Indian dance and music to the morning rush around them.

The music, a Hindustani classical mode known as a raga, may be unfamiliar to Western ears, but not the emotion that it conveys, said Rajnish Mishra. “We are just spreading peace through music,” he said. “Actually, music can’t be understood, but felt.”

“It’s kind of full circle,” Parul Shah said of her performance. The daughter of the owners of the former Tribeca restaurant Salaam Bombay, on Greenwich Street, Shah had a dance studio in the restaurant basement, blocks from the Twin Towers when they fell.

“This has really been home for us, and to be able to come here and to give a memorial performance is really important to me,” she said. “Hopefully, this little prayer dance can create an atmosphere of peace for a better future.”

This was the third September 11 performance that Jonathan Hollander, founder and artistic director of the Tribeca-based Battery Dance Company, has staged on the traffic island. The first dance, performed by Tadej Brdnik, took place two weeks after the attacks, when Tribeca was still in a “frozen” security zone. On the 20th anniversary, Hollander brought Brdnik back to dance with the current company.

Hollander has a long history with the Mishras. He called their late father and their uncle “two of the most revered artists of their generation,” who he had worked with for many years. In 1999, Hollander presented all four of the Mishras in a performance on the World Trade Center plaza. 

“Now we are back and it’s a good feeling,” Rajnish said.

For his part, Hollander, a veteran of outdoor concerts, had worried about rain. “But the skies cleared, their voices soared and Parul brought life and energy through dance,” he said. “So for me, it was a cathartic moment.”